"The Money Is NOT In The List!" - The Art of Traffic Generation

Hello DP members,

I just wanted to take a snippet from my upcoming
product "The Viral Marketing Blackbook" and share a
little inspiration with you.

The Art Of Traffic Generation

As you may know, traffic is the lifeblood to success
for all online businesses. Making money on the internet
is all about traffic monetization.

You probably heard this phrase many many times before:
"The money is in the list".

WRONG!

And nope, it is also not "the money is what you do with
the list". The list is just part of the big picture in
internet marketing. Building a list is just one way of
generating and monetizing your traffic.

But in the end, everything comes down to traffic.
Forget what the so-called "gurus" have taught you over
the years. Most of them probably haven’t even made a
single cent outside the internet marketing niche, and
only know how to make money by teaching others how to
make money.

The true remarkable stars of internet marketing are
people like Larry Page and Sergey Brin (founders of
Google), Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith (founders of
Hotmail), David Filo and Jerry Yang (founders of Yahoo),
Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay), Jeff Bezos (founder
of Amazon) etc.

I don't think any of these made their billions using
an opt-in list. They made their billions by driving
massive traffic to their website and monetizing them.
List building is just one way of monetizing
your traffic.

The foundation of all internet businesses is traffic.
No matter how good your website looks, if you don’t
have any traffic, you won’t make any money. Using a
red headline in your sales letter isn’t going to help
much if you are only receiving 10 impressions a day.

Stop wasting your time and money, trying to find the
"secret" formula to increasing your Adsense revenue
or your subscriber list. Concentrate on building the
quality targeted traffic first, before working on your
conversion rates.

Many people think conversion is the way to get started.
Yes, conversion is essential, but you need the traffic
to work on your conversion. Even if your conversion
stinks, you can still make tons of money if you have a
large volume of traffic.

That is why you should focus on building the traffic
first, so that you are in a much better position to test
the conversions.

Bottom line: the person with the most traffic wins almost
every time.

This brings me to the basic formula to online success:

Traffic + Conversion = Profits

It is as simple as that. Get massive amounts of traffic,
and convert as much of it as you can. If you can achieve
that, then you will become rich online. This is the exact
same fundamental formula ALL online businesses use,
including Google and Yahoo. EVERY SINGLE marketing tactic
in the entire universe fall under either the "traffic"
or "conversion" category.

(If you can think of one which does not fall into one
of the two categories, please tell me, because I want
to know )

Do you think Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube
because they had good advert optimization or good web
design? NO. They bought YouTube because it had a wide
audience and massive traffic, even though it had no
revenue. Google paid for the traffic that they hope
will eventually monetize and convert to create profit.

So by being able to generate traffic, and constantly
testing and tracking to see what converts, you will
make money.

Fundamentals of Traffic Generation

According to internet guru John Reese (of income.com),
there are only three legal ways of generating traffic
in the entire universe (with the fourth being stealing,
which is using spywares etc).

1. Buy Traffic

You can buy traffic. This includes things like PPC
advertising, banner advertising, ezine advertising,
co-registration etc.

2. Create Traffic

You can create traffic. This may involve things like
article marketing, press releases, search engine
optimization, traffic from your list, social networking,
social bookmarking etc.

3. Borrow Traffic

Finally, you can borrow traffic. There is no better way
than to leverage other people’s traffic. This may include
things like placing ads on other people’s ezine or
newletter, joint ventures etc.

Viral Traffic

Traffic from viral marketing goes somewhere in between
creating traffic and borrowing traffic. This is probably
the most powerful way of generating massive amounts of
free traffic.

In fact, many successful businesses you see today
(both online and offline) succeeded by using the power
of viral marketing, or word-of-mouth advertising as
its called offline. And of course, most importantly,
viral traffic is free.

The Fatal Traffic Mistake

Before I move on, let me start off by emphasizing
something vitally important to you. This is probably the
number one fatal traffic mistake almost everyone makes
when trying to get traffic to their website. This mistake
practically guarantees that they are wasting their time
and money on ineffective advertising.

And what is this fatal mistake?

They do not track every traffic source individually.

Tracking every single traffic source individually,
including individual keywords, is the most important
thing if you want to get profitable traffic. And if
you are not doing that, then you won’t be able to know
which traffic sources are making you money, and which
are not, meaning that you won’t be able to improve and
increase your targeted traffic.

Are you confused?

Here is an example. Let’s say I ran a pay-per-click
campaign, placed some banner ads and bought some ezine
ads to drive traffic to my website, but I forgot to
track my traffic individually. At the end of the day,
I look at my results and see that I have spent $500
on advertising and earned $1000 in revenue. I made a
stunning $500 profit! I should be happy right?

Absolutely not.

Why? Because there is a good chance that probably $400 of
the $500 spent on advertising was useless, and probably
all the revenue came from the $100 advertising. If I
was tracking the traffic source individually, and was
able to pin-point where the traffic were coming from,
I could have saved up to $400 and have made a profit of
$900 rather than $500.

And that is the number one fatal mistake almost everyone
makes.

As John Reese said, "testing and tracking is where
95% of the profit is made", because it allows you to
differentiate the winners from the losers.

---

To your success,

Stanley Tang

 

great work, thank you.

 

Very intriguing work you have going there!

 

Thanks everybody... I hope it helped you guys!

-Stanley Tang

 

Great work.This must be a sticy.

 

nice job on explaining. but i dont know why i think something still missing and i feel empty after read this... (should be my own problem) anyway. good works.

 

That's because it's just a 'snippet' from my upcoming book... lol

 

Wow...

Thanks for the great post.

 

Thanks guppyman.

 

BUT you ARE building a list !

Good marketing & self promotion

 

This is a great post, but I'm going to have to disagree

The money IS MOST DEFINITELY IN THE LIST

You mentioned,

The true remarkable stars of internet marketing are
people like Larry Page and Sergey Brin (founders of
Google), Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith (founders of
Hotmail), David Filo and Jerry Yang (founders of Yahoo),
Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay), Jeff Bezos (founder
of Amazon) etc.

Well, I can agree with you on Page and Brin, but Hotmail, Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, they all amde their millions of their lists....

A list doesn't have to be something that you sign up on to for a free product, it can very much be a buyer list or a subscription.

Hotmail and Yahoo, built their lists from their FREE EMAIL PROGRAM, just like giving away free products or a guide, they gave away an email address.

Within this email address unknowingly you were marketed products and advertisments, etc. That is where they started to make money.

They pulled you in from their program, and told you about nwer things they were doing, such as Yahoo Shopping.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Ebay, did the same thing, pulled in people from their free program first, but then marketed the whole idea of their program, and put a cost on it.

People liked doing it, thus they made money.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

What is google doing now? They have a list of emails, can market to them, all their products, newsletters, etc...

You see the money really is in the list, traffic is just a factor to building this list, but really if tou want to make millions you need a list.


Why is Mysapce, facebook, and youtube selling for billions...

BECAUSE OF THE LIST OF PEOPLE CONNECTED.

 

I do agree with you, steveceleste

 

so do i...

 

Well, the money is not in THE list. If you look deeper than just the surface, you'll see that the list is not the panacea. It's the traffic that builds the list

 

....lol

 

Nice article, well job done. Rep added.

 

Thanks. Nice job!

 

Great Article and another good debate. "youtube" certainly backs up your comments.

But a good list is still a good pension !

 

Very informative and actually quite accurate, traffic means diddly if your sole goal is revenue. You must pinpoint the highest conversion rate possible with certain ad campaigns. Trial and error... you wont hit the nail on the head the first time out. The only downside is testing takes money however you can get by spending less than 100 bucks a run.

 

Great post and informative debate over here. Then again, how do you define a good conversion rate? What is the acceptable figure for lowest and highest conversion rate?